Churbuck.com

Break out the Model T, time for the Joads to flee the Dust Bowl. Today the Wall Street Journal reports:

“The blue-chip measure ended the year down 34%, its worst annual performance since 1931. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq plummeted 39% and 41%, respectively, for the year.”

courtesy of Eliot C.

On the water for a scull around Grand Island — taking advantage of still winds, calm waters, and decent temperatures (28 f). So I launched in barefeet, taking note of the slushy water in the shallows, climbed aboard, and started sculling, staying a short distance from the beach in the event of an unplanned capsizing.

Crunch.

Ran into a pancake of ice the size of a basketball court, slid through it, thinking “the hull on this boat is 1/16″ of carbon fiber”, then broke through and continued on my way.

Last row of 2008? Few days to go, we shall see.

200,671 meters spread across the 28 days between Thanksgiving and tonight, Christmas Eve. Ended it this afternoon with a final 10,000 meter piece in the boat shop, sweating to some heavy metal cranked on the iPod and setting my best 10K time of 2008 with a heart rate up around hummingbird levels.

Some dude rowed 1.5 million meters in 28 days — that’s 50,000+ meters per day, which, to my crude math, is close to four hours a day – every day – on a rolling seat  with a handle attached to a bike chain and a fan.  So Don Siebert, age 60, out there in Lansing, MI. This Bud’s for you.

I celebrated by eating two pounds of Vermont’s best cheese and a $80 cassoulet ordered and assembled per the instructions from D’Artagnan, a duck specialty mailhouse I found on the web. I ate like a Roman tonight and now need to hire a little boy to tie my shoes.

And to all good night and a happy happy holiday. Stay tuned for the Churbuck year in review and some random non-work posts over the next few days.

The new X200 I’ve been configuring comes with an integrated GPS. I played with the utility application ThinkVantage GPS 2.01 inside the house — which is of course stupid as the device needs to be outside, under the blue sky, in order to pick up the satellites and triangulate a fix.

So I went outside this morning in the December chill, turned on the software, waited a few minutes for the satellites to be detected, and then output the results to Google Maps.

Ta-da. A map of Cotuit but no icon showing me where I am in Cotuit.

Now I need to figure out the application for everyday consumers like me. Velcro the laptop to the dashboard? Not as cool as my Garmin. Take sailing? Would need to buy a NOAA nautical chart pack and hope the waterproof keyboard is up to green water over the bow. Which it won’t be. What can one do with a GPS in a notebook? Stay tuned, I’ll figure something out.

With a mere 20,000 meters to go before I make the 200,000 meter Holiday Challenge, I entered the 2009 CRASH-B World Indoor Rowing Championships on February 22. Two months of training to get my 2,000 time down to something respectable. I’ll be in the Veteran’s 50-54 Heavyweights and the world record is 6:07. My best 2K is around a 6:25 or something in my early 40s …. so I’ll be happy to get under 7 minutes this year.

Something to obsess about.

The wife wants to go to Vermont to attend a surprise 50th birthday party for a fourth grade classmate (and godmother to our daughter) and before I can permit my innate agoraphobia to veto the expedition, she pre-pays two nights in a B&B so I have to go or risk burning $300 in Amex charges.

Off we go on Friday in the all-wheel-drive vehicle, forging north and west into the teeth of an iminent blizzard forecast to drop a foot of snow on Cape Cod. By the time I get to the Vermont border, it’s snowing like the Donner Party and traffic is moving at a resoundingly sluggish 20 mph on Route 91 on one lane of slick asphalt. Oh joy. Oh semi-trailers laden with logs going 70 mph in the fast lane and blowing total white-outs in their path. Wife is doing contortions of panic in the seat next to me. Begging me to find safe refuge off the highway from hell.

Forge on! I declare and we limp into Waitsfield, Vermont, 350-butt-puckering-miles later. I find a bar (the magnificant Pitcher Inn of Warren, Vermont), get a glass of 52 year-old armagnac and turn into a total couch potato in front of a roaring fire as the snow falls and the world turns into a  remake of White Christmas, replete with carolers, grumpy dairy farmers in their Johnson woolies, and dusty mooseheads staring from the log cabin walls.

Life improves. Saturday the village is covered with diamond sparkling powder so we head to the mountains, Mad River Glen to be exact, an anachronistic, socialistic cooperative ski area where snowboarding is banned, there is no snow making apparatus, and there is no grooming of the rocky, icy, gnarly slopes of General Stark Mountain. We meet good friend and former cycling partner Marta in the lodge, I get all comfy with the concept of some lodge chili and local microbrew, when Marta decides it is a good time to go snowshoeing and introduces us to the resident naturalist, Sean, who gets us equipped, hands me a vague map, and recommends we try the “challenging” trail.

Off we go, up mountain, through the woods, in a total Last of the Mohicans experience that rapidly deteriorates into Lost Bohican (bend over, here it comes again) as I lose the trail and begin to learn the perspiration wicking wonder of wool, becoming sodden in forty pounds of Dave sweat while standing up to my knees in a silent birch forest with the bluejays and squirrels making the only noise.

Lost,  we forge onwards — this is how it always begins I say to myself — and get more lost by the minute. No water. No compass. Great.

Then I hear a skiier on a trail, catch a flash of color, and head to an ungroomed slope. Wife and I trudge down the hill, to the base lodge, where we call it a day and turn in the snowshoes. So there’s a supposedly cool thing I can say I have done (and would do again, but with better preparation next time.)

Surprise 50th birthday party was conducted in a restored barn. Bluegrass band. BBQ. I was happy.

Then we drove home yesterday into the teeth of an even bigger snowstorm. Wife unhappy with conditions. Me tempting disaster in the unplowed fast lane. Home by 1 pm into a howling rainstorm. Cotuit is the antithesis of Vermont. Where they have pretty snow, we have grey slush and dog poo surfacing through the mess.

Migrating from one PC to the next (never mind going from a Mac to a PC or vice-versa) is one ugly, nasty, stupid experience. From moving my corporate persona from one laptop to the next, to reconfiguring all my favorite non-corporate apps (Adobe Photoshop Elements, Flickr uploader, Office 2007, blah blah blah).

It feels tedious just beefing about it.

The days of locally resident applications is so ripe to be shotgunned from existence the way the world finally croaked 50 lb. CRT displays and is in the process of doing away with spinning hard drives in favor for solid state.  The optical drive just needs to go away, maybe preserved for some old DVDs to watch on the flight, but other than that — I want my software up in the cloud where someone else can upgrade it, patch it, and deal with it. Just give me my user name and password and be done with it. Digging around closets for my official copy of Office 2007 — and then having to patch it to the latest service pack? Life is too darned short for such stupidity.

Oh, and give me free broadban WAN while you’re at it please.

Pretty please?

airtraffic

This is cool — every flight in the world in 72 seconds. Thanks to Esteban for the twitter link.

Here’s a list of tactics I think should be attended to before new monies are invested in digital marketing. Let’s call these three macro  tactics the Thrifty Trinity, and they are what I would tackle before making excuses that you can’t build the business without an investment. CFOs aren’t making investments these days, indeed, that 2009 budget you’re waiting to kick in next month? Assume it is going to shrink.

1.  SEO: I am not a fan of agency/consultant based SEO and ascribe to the Calacanis heretical view that if you need to perform SEO as an overt tactic then you’re doing something wrong. But SEO is the other side of the paid search coin — proof of the cliche that a penny saved through a higher organic ranking is a penny that can be spent elsewhere in the SEM portfolio of search terms. With paid search over 25% – to as high as 50% — of many digital media plans, SEO is cost effective tactic — strike that, SEO is like breathing, do it right and you thrive –  that requires general greater attention from production and content, good technical implementation, and an overall awareness from PR to blogs that clear, concise writing, credible links, and a manic desire to elevate one’s rank.  Just keep in mind — everything starts with a search. So start your dour marketing there. Just think like a customer, start searching like one, and see where your organization returns. Read Hunt and Moran. Avoid consultants.

2. Social: Get Google Reader, figure out how to subscribe to RSS feeds of searches on your primary brand terms (e.g. “Chevrolet” “Chevy” “Impala” etc.), a couple C-level executive names, and start reading what people say about you. Avail yourself of the torrent of free advice on how to engage an angry customer and make it your mission to make one happy. Repeat over and over. Don’t advertise on Facebook because you think it is au courant. Don’t pay a blogger for coverage. Open your own blog. Make it your blog. Talk about your dinner. What you are reading. Get comfortable with it.  It’s a good career move and when the time comes to get involved with corporate blogging, you’ll know what you’re talking about. Don’t let your external PR agency dictate the terms to you. Don’t pay attention to social media monitoring services. You can’t afford either.

3. Plan: if you have a media budget then sit down, take a hard look at a single dollar. Let’s call this “your next marketing dollar.” Now take a hard look at your media plan, your operation budget, and ask yourself — how can I make this dollar sing for its supper? What portion of it needs to go into paid search? What portion in display/banners? Should I be playing in affiliate marketing programs? What is my goal? What is the success event I want that dollar to drive and how am I going to make every penny in that dollar prove its contribution to that goal?

Next: a quick reading list

The nice thing about Facebook has been the coalescing of random Churbucks around the FB group. “All Things Churbuckian” organized by Paula Churbuck. One of the Churbucks to come out of the woodwork was Frederick Churbuck, a young man from Colorado who pinged me in an email with a question about how were we related.

I have no idea — but shared my theory that some semi-literate ancestor in Southeastern Massachusetts (The Churbuck name seems to be concentrated in Middleboro, Wareham and the Upper Cape) messed up the first “B” in “Chubbuck”, didn’t close the bottom loop and left it open as an “R”. Hence Churbuck is a typo from Chubbuck, of which there is also a sizable population in the same aforementioned towns.

Frederick asked if I knew of the place where he spent his summers, a grand mansion on the seaside of Buzzard’s Bay with the name of “Windsway.”

I had not, but on Thanksgiving my daughter and I set out for Old Silver Beach in West Falmouth, and under dramatic lowering skies, saw off to the northwest a pretty impressive house on a peninsula. Just as Frederick described it.

Was it “Windsway?”

Here’s the picture I took.

Windsway?

Frederick says it is at the end of Wild Harbor Road, and indeed, this is the last stop on Wild Harbor Road.

Amazing. And no, I didn’t come from that branch of Churbuck. Apparently the best known of the Falmouth Churbucks is the painter Leander. Of the rest of that branch, I know very little. I wish I were retired and could indulge my geneological urges. Alas. I cannot.

Update: George Taylor sent in the following picture of Windsway in its heyday. I like it better this way, the way it was.

I would no sooner pay a blogger to mention a product or service than I would pay a reporter for the same coverage.

The notion of engaging a third party — agency or individual — to produce content about a brand or product is tantamount to deceptive advertising and a mark of stupid desperation on the part of the marketer who approved it. (clarification: and then publish it as being ostensibly “objective”)

I have no issue with lending a product to a blogger or reviewer affiliated with the mainstream press under the usual terms of a loaner/reviewer program. I would not gift product or services  nor pay a fee to the writer.

Note the last word: “writer.” Bloggers, like journalists, are “writers” in my mind. I don’t care if their preferred medium is an audio podcast or a video Vlog — if they publish content publically and with an eye of making money from that traffic via advertising or promotion of their services, they are, loosely, to my mind, a “writer.”

If bloggers want to be accorded the same respect and gravitas of a professional journalist/writer then they need to abide by the same code of ethics. Journalists don’t accept money to cover stuff. Period. They may do that in some backwards nations, but not in the USA. Bloggers who join any sort of program that compensates them for coverage of any kind — positive or negative — openly disclosed or not — are, in my traditional ethical mindset, crossing the line.

Bloggers in the social media space — consultants and theorists — are probably due some excuse if they check out these services and report on them dispassionately. But as an ongoing revenue stream and practice — it’s grounds for not being considered in any media plan. I understand there are many bloggers who need to make some money from their blog and I don’t dispute their right to monetize their traffic, but payola is crossing the line. Contextual advertising, or an overall sponsorship is one thing. But paid posting is a no go.

Bloggers don’t need to behave like a Washington Post reporter: accepting no gifts, no junkets, pay for “free” coffee, and avoiding anything that would indicate a bias. Blogs seem more like oped — at least at a personal level — than the press, but if a blogger wants the respect and authority accorded to the mainstream press then they need to behave like one. Disclosure statements are not enough.

I recently unfollowed one prominent social marketing blogger and columnist for perceived ethical transgressions. I regret that I am unfollowing another today. I am not going public with my unfollow list, but let’s say there is a coterie of social marketing bloggers — not actual marketers but theorists or agency people — who are really pissing me off with their echo chamber and questionable ethics. I am turning them off.

I am not going to call people out in public anymore. This social marketing niche is getting way too incestuous and repetitive and frankly, stupid in its repetitive back slapping, re-affirmation, ego stroking, and over amplification of the same desperate case studies.  Rather than squawk and bitch I am simply turning up the squelch. End of rant.

Disclosure: I don’t run ads on this blog, I used to be a reporter, no one sends me free stuff (other than Uncle Fester), and I need to stop being angry so much.

Esteban beat me to this on Dec. 4th

Sobering news from a forecasting guru, but a glimmer of light for interactive and digital spending, especially search.

“The brunt of the 6.9 percent fall-off in 2009 ad spend will be felt by newspapers (-15.0%), Yellow Pages (-14.0%), consumer magazines (-13.0%), radio (-12.0%), local television (-10.5%), business-to-business and custom publishing (-9.0%), and broadcast network television (-4.0%). Even online media will feel the pain, with projected overall growth of a meager 2.7 percent. Online display ads are forecast to grow only one percent, with search engine marketing increasing 8.0% and online video, search engine, widget advertising increasing at a 25.0% rate to $1.5 billion. Online growth will pick up again in 2010 with overall 8.5% increases.”

Link

I’m messing around with a screenplay. A few years ago I bought as copy of some screenwriting software — FinalCut or something like that — but can’t find the unlock key and don’t care to pay for it a second time.

So, being in a freetard mood as my latest blog comment buddy, RattyUK, puts it, I googled for “Open Screenwriting” and found Scriptbuddy.

This is a good cloud app. Free to use. Pay a fee so I can print. Brilliant. No nagware.

Best part — it handles the semi-arcade world of screenplay formatting so I don’t have to.

Seven minutes in, 113 to go.

Monday – Tuesday 12.15-16: Cotuit

Wednesday: 12.17 personal day

Thursday: 12.18 Cotuit

Busy week of phone work, planning, writing, drafting, powerpointing, and year-end wrap up.  Killing off one PC and transferrring to a new one (that is eating the spare moments this weekend. Started a screenplay on the King Phillip Indian War of 1675 (working title “Metacomet”).  Still picking away at Shadow Country.  Need to see the accountant on Wednesday for tax stuff. Friday hit the road early for roadtrip to Vermont. Following week me and the rest of the world basically goes on break for the holidays.

Daughter returns from college on Tuesday. Son … not sure. In-laws the following week. I’m already cooking — making up a chicken and beef stock this weekend for some serious end of year cooking. On the agenda — a cassoulet perhaps, definitely a beef bourguignon, and then a big roast — perhaps a stuffed saddle of lamb or a goose on Xmas. New Year’s Eve … undetermined at this point.

Today I crossed the 100,000 meter mark in the annual Concept2 Holiday Challenge — 200,000 miserable meters between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.

Today I crossed the 100,000 meter mark, meaning I am way behind and need to do 9K a day for the remaining days without missing a single session. That’s out the window as I’m off to Vermont next weekend for a friend’s 50th birthday party — which means I need to do some 15,000 meter or one-hour long erg sessions this week to stay on course. Woe is me. All this for the right to buy a t-shirt and another pin to nail into the wall of my erg/gym barn.

Sorry Mister Jobs,  iTunes, as revolutionary as it was when it was introduced, is enough of a DRM-infested annoyance that I am saying sayonara and following Uncle Fester to the new fields of Songbird.

What is Songbird? Think of what Thunderbird did for email clients, or Firefox for browsers, and Songbird is doing the same for media. It’s iTunes, but without the holier than thou Mac b.s. that iTunes nyah-nyahs in your face. It’s an open source music and media platform, and I for one am sick and tired of proprietary and closed when it comes to stuff I pay for. Songbird is open and extensible and runs on Linux. Which is good enough for me for now.

There. I have ranted. Now, as I set up my new ThinkPad X200 and “deauthorize” the iTunes library on my old machine and move it, once and for all, away from Apple’s clutches (and its update-insistence that I download Safari), it feels good to see my iPod appear in Songbird. My stuff is still with me.

New Wordpress 2.7 is installed and the admin/console is VERY different. Including this little streamofconsciousness poster.

Lenovo’s “Customer of the Year” — Constantine von Hoffman (for threatening to tell people we delivered a ThinkPad to him ahead of schedule) — has posted his annual list of the top marketing boners, blunders, bloopers, etc.. I strongly recommend a full visit, my favorite is Vista toilet paper and Lolita brand beds.

1 Ford features “Space Oddity” — a song about astronaut suicide — in new car campaign.

2 Framingham State College uses the word blah 137 times in a 312-word fundraising letter.

3 Disney (multiple entries): Bans kids from DisneyWorld restaurant; Changes “It’s A Small World” to “A Salute to All Nations, But Mostly America”; and Sells “High School Musical” panties for tween girls with the phrase “Dive In” on them.

4 Woolworths (UK) launches Lolita brand of beds for young girl

See the rest below ….

Top 10 Marketing Blunders of 2008 « Collateral Damage.

Andy Buckley — I discovered this one this morning on Cape Cod Today. His bio:

“Novelist, politician, photographer, game designer, master mariner, clamdigger and investigator, Andy Buckley is an eleventh-generation Cape Codder with a Renaissance flair. His Tours of Cape Cod (Schiffer Books) will be published in May 2008. Read Andy’s Monomoyick column in the Cape Cod Chronicle and visit Monomoyick on YouTube and on Panoramio. Andy can be emailed here.”

“When I bought my commercial shellfishing license towards the end of the May 31 deadline, the number of my license caught my attention. It was low. In years past, if I waited this late to fork over the $200 to the town, the number was close to six hundred. Instead this year, it was about half of that.

“It shouldn’t be too surprising. With the proliferation of aquaculture in neighboring towns and the region, as well as the discovery of a large bed of ocean quahogs in Nantucket Sound, the price of littlenecks clams has fallen from over 20 cents a piece to below ten. Often, four hours or less of work could bring close to a hundred dollars in the summer. Not a bad way to supplement income from other work, and pay the high cost of living in Chatham.

Buckley’s Blog.

He blogs at http://www.monomoyick.com